Revival: Sarah Siddons 1802–1811

The Winter’s Tale with a relatively complete text was revived by actor-manager John Philip Kemble’s (1757–1823) production at the Drury Lane Theatre, 25 March 1802, with Hermione played by Kemble’s acting partner and sister, Sarah Siddons (1755–1831).Footnote ³³ When Siddons spoke Hermione’s: ‘I had thought, sir, to have held my peace’ (1.2.27) it was the first recorded occasion since the 1630s that an audience heard these words in a professional performance. Kemble’s Winter’s Tale was spectacularly produced, designed to satisfy a growing preference for lavish sets, costumes, and technological advances in stagecraft. The first scene was set in an ancient Grecian square, the remaining Sicilia scenes were played in a Tudor setting.Footnote ³⁴ This was her first performance of Hermione, and the production showcased Siddons’ strengths: it emphasized the tragic and minimized the comic. The Evening Mail is representative of the enthusiastic critical reception: the play was ‘brought forward in almost every respect, with a judgement and attention that are highly credible to the Manager [Kemble]’ and ‘The Hermione of Mrs. Siddons towers above all praise’ (26 March 1802).

Playing Hermione marked an important point in Siddons’ long career. She had acted many of Shakespeare’s women, including Lady Macbeth, Constance in King John, and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. For decades she triumphed in tragedy, but she also continued to keep roles that were no longer suitable. Now middle-aged, she had become too old and, some complained, too stout for many of her signature roles, including Juliet and Rosalind. Introducing Hermione offered a satisfying challenge with a suitably dignified part, a Shakespeare role she had never played, costumes suitable to her matronly shape, and the opportunity to put into practice costume reforms. Nina H. Kennard points out in Mrs Siddons (1893) that Hermione was among the actresses’ ‘greatest successes’ and ‘was more suited to her age and appearance than others that she undertook in late life’.Footnote ³⁵

Kemble’s commitment to grandeur included costumes that were imaginatively based on historic art and artefacts, instead of the usual practice of dressing all characters in contemporary clothing. For Siddons’ first scenes Hermione was wrapped in richly coloured robes, probably in the Tudor style and repurposed from her performance that season as Queen Katherine in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. This meant that Hermione’s visible pregnancy could be dressed with decorum in a historically inspired garment, discretely suited to her mature figure. The costume would have approximated late pregnancy through padding or simply by shaping the robes to create the correct silhouette. After years of costumes hiding her own pregnancies from audiences, in her last major role Siddons needed to make it clear to the audience that this character was about to give birth.Footnote ³⁶ Her costume would have co-ordinated with Kemble’s own as Leontes in the first act: a velvet and gold mantle, a blue and gold dress and a gold coronet with white plumes.Footnote ³⁷ But Siddons would have arranged what she wore with an eye on Regency taste, and put into practice her reform of tragedy costumes to end ‘the enormous head-gear and hoops and flounces of the previous day.Footnote ³⁸ In her Reminiscences, the actress writes about her preference in her own clothing for a more natural look that was without stays, avoided fashionably dressed powdered hair and overly decorated dresses.Footnote ³⁹ Siddons’ costumes recorded in drawings and paintings, including Joshua Reynold’s Sarah Siddons as Tragic Muse (1774) trace her transition toward this simpler style, and her preferences were very much in tune with fashion.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although the third act’s trial scene would have made use of Siddons’ skill in tragedy, it was her appearance in the statue scene that received the most attention in print. This would have been a scene familiar from Garrick’s adaptation, Florizel and Perdita. Kemble’s innovation was to present Hermione as a classically dressed Grecian statue instead of the fashionable déshabillé gowns seen in eighteenth-century actresses’ images.Footnote ⁴¹ Siddons’ Hermione resembled the ancient statues that archaeologists were sending to London for exhibition, and Kemble’s version of the statue scene evoked the Hellenic world through a mix of archaeology and fashionable art. The public’s interest in Greek and Roman remains had been growing since expanded excavations of Pompeii in the mid eighteenth century. Archaeological discoveries would continue to feed this interest. Regency fashion had already accustomed the public eye to dresses in slim columns, with short sleeves and bared arms, and Hermione’s statue costume, copied from antiquity, would have been simple to create. It only needed a supple fabric with enough substance to drape in deep folds, making it seem as much as possible as if it were carved from marble. On Siddons the effect was dramatic. Thomas Campbell says she ‘shewed great beauty of head, neck, shoulders, and arms that Praxiteles might have studied’.Footnote ⁴² James Boaden, who saw one of her Winter’s Tale performances, recalled in 1825 that she was ‘one of the noblest statues that even Grecian taste ever invented. The figure posed something like one of the muses in profile. The drapery was ample in its folds and seemingly stony in its texture’.Footnote ⁴³ Those seemingly stony folds were actually highly flammable muslin that surrounded her. Siddons described in a letter how she was nearly ‘terminated’ when ‘my drapery flew over the lamps that were placed behind my pedestal’ and, except for the quick action of a stagehand, they would have ‘run like wildfire’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This costume is evoked in the Westminster Abbey and Paddington Green monuments that celebrate Siddons’ career and present her as a classical statue.

Transition: Helen Faucit (Lady Martin) 1837

From Sarah Siddons onwards, the role of Hermione has generally been played by women in their thirties or forties; Ellen Terry was fifty-two when she played her for the first time. A major exception to the trend is Helen Faucit (1817–1898) who was only twenty when she played Hermione in Willian Charles Macready’s production at Covent Garden in 1837. Macready (1793–1873), the ‘Eminent Tragedian’, was a dramatic force in early Victorian theatre, known for his Shakespeare productions, the patronage of Queen Victoria, his commitment to raising the level of national culture, and his ‘strenuous endeavours to advance the drama as a branch of national literature and art’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Macready attempted to revive Shakespeare’s popularity in the manner of Kemble, including using some of his sets and costumes. He hired Faucit, despite her youthfulness, as the company’s leading actress to take on many of the roles played by Siddons. Faucit’s career is carefully documented in Carol Jones Carlyle’s biography (Reference Carlyle2000); also given a useful but hagiographic account in the biography/memoir by her husband Sir Theodore Martin (Reference Martin1900); and discussed by herself in a collection of essays about her Shakespeare roles: Ophelia, Portia, Desdemona, Juliet, Imogen, Rosalind, Beatrice, and, in the second edition, Hermione (1891).Footnote ⁴⁶ Her comments on Hermione’s pregnancy are a mix of Victorian sentimentality (the book is dedicated to the Queen) and ideas that are as modern as the conversations of today’s actors. Faucit is deeply romantic about marriage and motherhood, both of which she had experienced. She writes of Hermione’s ‘years of happy wedlock’ and points out that in productions it is always the left hand that she gives to Leontes, ‘the one with the wedding ring’.Footnote ⁴⁷ She sounds very modern when describing how during performances she imagined what Hermione’s thoughts ‘would be about the baby she was carrying’. She imagined, and perhaps used this in performance, that Hermione was ‘suddenly reminded by a painful throb of her impending trial [and] affrighted by the thought that jailors are to be her sole attendants’ at the birth.Footnote ⁴⁸

Although Faucit was a member of a theatrical family,Footnote ⁴⁹ and was experienced on stage, her first performance of Hermione, when she was twenty, was heavily controlled by Macready whose ‘will was law’.Footnote ⁵⁰ His style could be overly theatrical. Her description of an incident in their first performance of the statute scene gives a sense of his acting method. Her costume would have been a version of Siddons’ Grecian statue and included, as she says, a veil covering her ‘bound’ hair. Faucit recalled that when Hermione came to life and stepped down from the dais, ‘his passionate joy seemed beyond control; now he was prone at my feet, then embracing me and caressing the unbound hair that escaped from beneath the veil’. When she shrieked in surprise, Macready whispered to her: ‘Don’t be frightened, my child! Don’t be frightened!’Footnote ⁵¹ This is a much-quoted story, used to demonstrate the passionate intensity of Macready’s acting style, but it also includes a useful costume note. Macready’s Shakespeare productions copied Kemble’s as much as possible, so Hermione’s costumes would have been influenced by his ideas of what Siddons wore, including Tudor robes for her first two scenes. Faucit would have been responsible for adding the pregnancy’s shape. She described how earlier that season her mother helped her pad out a costume to give her Queen Katherine in Henry VIII (a famous Siddons role) a matronly shape. She may have done something similar for Hermione, definitely necessary to create the pregnancy curve. Her husband remembers ‘her distinction of manner, and the power as well as pathos of her acting, triumphed over the disadvantages of her youth, which no ingenuity of dress could conceal’.Footnote ⁵²

Later she continued to use antique dress in her own productions. Working independently from Macready, the actress staged revivals of Antigone (1843) and Iphigenia in Aulis (1846). Various photographs and Sir Frederick Williams Burton’s drawings show her in costumes copied from Greek statues. The chiton and mantle are beautifully draped to display her ‘heroically proportioned limbs’ and ‘potent combination of physical and spiritual appeal’.Footnote ⁵³ Her memoir, covering a career that spanned nearly a century, starts with an artistic inheritance from an eighteenth-century actress, and ends with a perceptive discussion of Shakespeare’s women at the end of that century.

Ancient World: Ellen Kean Reference Kean1856 and Ellen Terry 1906

The first time Ellen Kean (1805–1880) played Hermione was in Macready’s 1835 Winter’s Tale, the next time was twenty years later. This was the 1856 production by her husband Charles Kean (1811–1868) at the Princess’s Theatre, London, which he managed from 1850 to 1859, and where the couple made a speciality of Shakespeare productions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Success was based on a combination of a relatively full text and spectacular staging. The ‘revival’ (his preferred term) of The Winter’s Tale was lavish: a cast of over 170 extras, 500 costumes, special effects made possible by new technology, and every detail presented with as much historical accuracy as possible. Responding to critical complaints about excessive detail, he defended his staging as ‘recreation wherein instruction is blended with amusement’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Kean satisfied audiences’ increasing taste for spectacle but made it respectable.

Given Kean’s obsession with archaeological accuracy, it is impressive that his wife succeeded in refusing to conform with her costumes. But, according to Ellen Terry, she was in many ways ‘the leading spirit in the theatre; at the least, a joint ruler, not a queen-consort’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Keans’ Winter’s Tale was done as a ‘Greek play with Greek dresses, Greek customs, and Greek architecture’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The exception was Ellen’s costumes which she insisted on adapting to suit her own sense of propriety. This is not the situation of an eighteenth-century actress insisting on being modishly fashionable, but of a nineteenth-century woman maintaining fashionable decorum. Nevertheless, Ellen Kean chose to wear a visibly pregnant costume that fitted closely to the mid-section of the body and emphasized its bulky shape. The pregnancy was realistic in size and form and very much of her devising. The style of the dress and the pattern of its decorations were loosely adapted from a vase painting, ‘The Marriage of Hercules and Hebe’.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is the only one of her three costumes that Kean included in his ‘Historical Notes’ where he listed the sources for thirty-six costumes (major and minor roles) based on ancient painted vases. Hermione’s pregnancy costume is a loosely draped garment in a light fabric, with soft folds, a simple neckline, the bodice gathered below the bust. The dress was decorated with dark geometric designs around the hem and down the front. A wide mantle (the Greek himation), in similar colour and design, was wrapped close around the body, and highlighted the pregnancy’s shape with its border decoration forming a diagonal line across the belly.Footnote ⁵⁹ Three bracelets added a historic note (one worn high up on a bare arm, and one on each wrist), and so did the wreath of flowers around her head, which Kean explained was patterned on the chaplets worn in the ancient world on festive occasions.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the final act Hermione appeared as the classic Greek statue dressed in a chiton (or peplos), made of a white fabric heavy enough to suggest carved marble. In the third act’s trial scene she wore a regal costume that was closer to the Victorian style than the ancient Grecian. Made of dark coloured fabric, it had a simple long-sleeved bodice, a broad skirt, and referenced the ancient world with a wide mantle in the same fabric and colour, draped loosely across the body in the style of a toga. Her only ornament was the circlet of gold leaves on her head.Footnote ⁶¹ This photograph is frequently used as an illustration, but not identified as the trial scene.Footnote ⁶² The pose is confusing and suggests the statue because Hermione is standing by a pedestal, the prop seen in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pictures of Hermione as statue. (The tradition started by Garrick.Footnote ⁶³) The costume has no indication of the horrors endured by Hermione giving birth in prison, but the previous scene’s set included a backdrop of a terrifying medieval prison. All three costumes can be seen in photographs. Harvard’s Houghton Library has a series of three printed as cartes de visite produced to be sold as souvenirs, distributed as gifts, or used for publicity.Footnote ⁶⁴ In them Ellen Kean’s costumes tell the story of the actress’s independent shaping of her role, which included dressing Hermione with a deep commitment to current standards of propriety, including starched petticoats under all her dresses.

At mid nineteenth century and at the height of hoop skirt popularity, many actresses preferred to retain their contemporary stays and modest layers of underpinnings, even in classically styled productions, so Ellen Kean was not alone in keeping at least some of her petticoats. It is unexpected when Ellen Terry, fifty years later, resents Kean’s Hermione being ‘always bunched out by layer upon layer of petticoats, in defiance of the fact that classical parts should not be dressed in a superfluity of raiment’, the petticoat.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the three cartes de visite the costumes are not particularly ‘grotesque’. Perhaps it was easier for Ellen Kean to do with fewer petticoats in the photographer’s studio than on stage. The statues’ purely classic white chiton and himation seen in the photograph achieved modesty by using a heavy fabric folded so there was no hint of the shape of her thighs.Footnote ⁶⁶ Terry, who played Mamillius in the production, also objected at the time, at the age of eight, to the difference between costume design and reality in her costume’s very unclassical wrinkled pink tights worn under an ‘authentic’ smock.

Terry continued to resent what other actors do to their costumes. She writes that ‘then, [1856] as now, actors and actresses seemed unable to keep their own period and their own individuality out of the clothes directly they got them on their backs’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nevertheless, that is precisely what Terry herself did when she played Hermione in Beerbohm Tree’s 1906 production. Her Hermione costumes had little to do with Tree’s production designs, but instead reflected her own commitment to the fashions of the Aesthetic Movement and pre-Raphaelite painters. Terry always maintained control over her costumes by working with her own designer, Alice Comyns-Carr, and dressmaker, Mrs. Nettleship of 58 Wigmore St.Footnote ⁶⁸ For Tree’s production Terry’s daughter Edith Craig may have worked with her on the costumes. Her pregnancy ensemble combined Aesthetic Movement style and colours (yellow and green) and a reference to Ellen Kean’s maternity costume. In Terry’s version the very wide mantle was yellow with an intricate pattern woven into the wool. In photographs it looks as soft as a cashmere shawl and drapes toga-style from her shoulder, falling in gentle folds across the front of her body. It indicates the largeness of the pregnancy without actually outlining the body. The tunic underneath is a deep green, styled with a loosely gathered peasant-style bodice and open neckline.Footnote ⁶⁹ By the time Terry played Hermione, the role had become established as one of Shakespeare’s great women. It was also a role where leading actresses had directed their costumes’ designs for over a century, and this includes Mary Anderson’s staging where she was the producer and played Hermione and Perdita.

An American Hermione in London: Mary Anderson 1887

The popular success of Mary Anderson’s 1887 The Winter’s Tale is impressive as testimony to the drawing power of a celebrity in a popularized version of the play. Anderson was an American actress working as an independent producer, who returned to London for a third season at the Lyceum Theatre to present The Winter’s Tale. She starred in her own production and was the first performer on record to double Hermione and Perdita. Hermione’s pregnancy’s shape was made explicit, but softened by the costume’s layers as designed by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a painter specializing in sunlit, romantic images of women in antique dress.Footnote ⁷⁰ Anderson’s production was set in the ancient world, very much in the style of Charles Kean’s. The production was a popular success, and held the record for the play’s longest run until in 1951. The critics, to a man (and they were all men), unanimously hated almost everything about it, applauding only Alma-Tadema’s costumes, the grandeur of the sets, and the scene painters’ art. They did admire Anderson’s beauty, especially her skill at holding statuesque poses, but felt that was not enough to make this a good production, and that Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s Leontes was miscast. The critics’ objections make a long list that includes: Anderson’s acting, verse speaking, and American accent; her lapses remembering lines; her interpretation of Hermione (underdeveloped) and Perdita (overplayed). The critics remembered Ellen Kean and longed for Sarah Siddons who, based on her reputation, would have known how to perform Hermione. They found the doubling unnecessary, egoistical, and a grave mistake given Anderson’s limited talents. They objected to her cuts in the text that included removing two-thirds of Paulina’s lines, one of Autolycus’ scenes, and all of Time’s speeches. They complained about the bowdlerization of Shakespeare’s text, even though it differed very little from Kean’s. Critics, and much of the audience, found that dropping the curtain every fifteen minutes to create ‘tableau scenes’ was an annoying interruption that further lengthened a production that also required long intervals for scene changes. And they thoroughly disliked Anderson’s overenthusiastic fans who packed the house, cheered when Perdita danced, gave Hermione an ovation for the trial scene, and called her back repeatedly for curtain calls. This was consistently spelled out by reviewers in great detail.Footnote ⁷¹

The production was tailored to suit popular taste and was a box office success. To her adoring fans, the actress was a great talent whose production gave them her stunning beauty gorgeously dressed, spectacular staging, and satisfyingly melodramatic acting. They also had the comfort of knowing this was a safe version of The Winter’s Tale. The text would not offend propriety; Victorian sentiment would be upheld; sexual passion kept at bay; and irony would not be allowed.

Anderson embraced Hermione’s pregnancy as a factor in her sentimental portrayal of a mother who showers her young son with kisses, patiently awaits the birth of the next child, and nobly defends herself from false accusations. The Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, published that year, includes a description of Hermione that coincided with Anderson’s interpretation: ‘Shakespeare gives Hermione a quiet tenderness and a great patience … . [Her] gentle affection when attacked by Leontes is patience to the end, with love ever abiding. Love, patience, purity and faith in the powers above, shine through all words and acts of the afflicted queen.’Footnote ⁷² This was captured by Anderson in the nursery scene, which the Pall Mall Gazette (12 September 1887) reported was the first to stir up the audience ‘to any expression of pleasure’. The report describes the dark room lit by a glowing fire, her ladies playing music, and the ‘the stately Hermione, clad in the rather unbecoming red and purple Greek costume, reclining on her couch’. The ‘unbecoming red and purple’ costume may be the one seen on the cover of the Illustrated London News (12 September 1887). Although in black-and-white photographs it looks whiteish, the colour reproduction, possibly for a special edition, tints it purple. The dress evokes the chiton but is composed of layers of tunics, including a bodice that drapes down in deep folds that could suggest pregnancy. The colour reflects fashion’s growing preference for the newly invented aniline dyes in bright colours. Also, for this costume, the colour could be claimed as historically accurate based on discoveries of the Tanagras. These fourth-century-BCE polychrome statuettes of ‘draped women standing, sitting or dancing’ were discovered in the 1870s through tomb excavations in Boeotia, Greece and helped justify the use of coloured clothing in historical paintings of the ancient world.Footnote ⁷³

Anderson’s other notable uses of her costumes included the trial scene, where she used a large sheer shawl to completely cover herself when Hermione collapses at hearing Mamillius is dead. In the statue scene, she would have worn something similar to her costume (also designed by Alma-Tadema) for the statue Galatea in W. S. Gilbert’s new play Pygmalion and Galatea in her first season of renting the Lyceum in 1883.Footnote ⁷⁴ Anderson, using her control as the producer, had overruled Gilbert’s preference to stage the play in a modern style. He accepted the classic designs but ‘strongly objected to Alma-Tadema’s arrangement of her draperies’ as too restrictive and too heavily marble, joking that the designer wanted her to even play the role in a marble wig.Footnote ⁷⁵ There were no similar objections in 1887.

London and New York: ‘Medievalish-Renaissancy’ Costumes 1900’s

Mary Anderson’s production was the last of the nineteenth-century Winter’s Tale with elaborately researched sets and props representing the ancient world. The first decade of the twentieth century saw several elegantly produced versions of the play in New York and London. The general preference for sets and costumes was vaguely Renaissance with a touch of medievalism and the aura of the fairy tale books illustrations by Paul Dulac and Arthur Rackham.Footnote ⁷⁶ Hermione continued to be visibly pregnant in 1.2 and 2.1. The Edwardians embraced the romance of childhood that included the angelic mother. There was little connection with contemporary fashion, but the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement had ignited an interest in a romanticized medieval world that could easily morph into the Italian Renaissance. Good photographic records of Winthrop Ames’ New York production show Hermione (Edith Wynne Matthison) in a pregnancy costume that is a simple robe with a long panel of fabric that smoothed the front of the body. This is similar to the Italian zamorra favoured by Marie de Medici (1575–1642) during her pregnancies in France.

Between 1894 and 1905, William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society in London presented Shakespeare’s plays on a bare platform designed to replicate the acting conditions of the playwright’s own stage. Poel’s innovative productions also dressed the actors as they might have been seen by the original audiences and featured versions of Elizabethan and Jacobean dress for all costumes, no matter where or when a play takes place. His goal as an actor-manager was to free Shakespeare productions from the heavy weight of spectacular sets used by Charles Kean and Henry Irving, and return the plays to their original simple staging where actors had only the text and costumes to work with. His influence on Shakespeare productions was immense and continues on stage today. On the other hand, his influence on costumes was less effective, but still instrumental in establishing what became a standard hybrid period, identified by Ella Hawkins as ‘Jacobethan’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Poel’s company did not stage The Winter’s Tale, so nothing specific was established for dressing Hermione’s pregnancy, but his newly established historical style for female costumes was one of the contributors to the gradual flattening out of Hermione’s visible pregnancy. Elizabethan/Jacobean dress, as known by Poel, did not offer the material with which to establish a new theatrical convention for a royal queen’s ‘big-bellied’ pregnancy. This absence would later fit comfortably with the mid twentieth century’s preference for the disappearance of visible pregnancy. In Winter’s Tale the slimmer pregnancy costume corresponded to current social practice. Society bracketed off the gravid body, moving it off stage and, literally and figuratively, air brushing it out of the picture. The Winter’s Tale costumes reflecting this general lack of interest in a pregnant body included Motley’s Russian fairy tale costumes in 1948 and Jacques Noël’s Hermione’s costume in 1960.Footnote ⁷⁸

Silent Film: Thanhouser 1910

For early film companies Shakespeare represented culture, education, class, and could be strategic in raising films’ cultural profile. There were several silent film versions of The Winter’s Tale by different production companies including: Edison, 1909; Cines, 1910; Thanhouser, 1910, Milano, 1913, and Belle Alliance, 1914. Before becoming a film director, Edwin Thanhouser had thirty years of professional experience in the American theatre during a time when Shakespeare was a staple for any acting company, which may explain why his first two Shakespeare films were the relatively unknown Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline (1913). The Winter’s Tale, directed by Barry O’Neil, was the first of his company’s seven silent Shakespeare films, produced between 1910 and 1916 and an early ‘expression of the company’s cultural ambitions’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Hermione’s visibly pregnant costume in Thanhouser’s 1910 film of The Winter’s Tale is an example of the ways that theatre costumes influence those in early Shakespeare films. In Thanhouser’s film (available on DVD) the costumes are a dressing-up-box jumble of times and places. For example, Leontes and Polixenes are in ermine-trimmed robes similar to those in Winthrop Ames’ production running at the same time in New York City’s New Theatre (only forty-five minutes from Thanhouser’s studio).Footnote ⁸⁰ In the film, other members of the court are in a mix of the classical and exotic. The actors use typical silent film gestures and facial expressions, and the play is skilfully adapted. The visibly pregnant Hermione is in keeping with nineteenth-century theatre practices. Although this Hermione is neither as heavily pregnant as Ellen Kean had been in 1856, nor Lillah McCarthy would be in 1912, the pregnancy is clearly indicated, and its importance is emphasized. Hermione (Anna Rosemond) wears a discreet white smock, of no particular period but closer to the Italian Renaissance than ancient Greece. The ancient world of Greek and Rome is suggested by her bare arms with wide bracelets worn above the elbows. The pregnancy is indicated by the fullness of the simple dress and emphasized by the long dark belt worn low to outline her pregnancy’s shape. Over the dress she wears an open, full-length, sleeveless garment. On her first appearance she holds this up in front of her, draping it almost in toga-style, but when she walks, laughing and talking with Polixenes, it is open, framing the pregnancy’s fullness, but also suggesting something about her easiness in his company. The visible pregnancy is important in telling the story quickly, clearly and silently.

The set for Leontes’ court is a much-simplified version of Charles Kean’s and Mary Anderson’s versions of antiquity, including an Alma-Tadema-influenced marble terrace with a view of the Mediterranean. This set and the costumes may well have come from the stock of Thanhouser’s previous theatre company. Leontes’ few courtiers (as many as the set has room for) wear Roman tunics and sandals, or unidentified exotic robes and headgear. Hermione’s ladies wear a mix of styles, including diaphanous ensembles that are part Orientalist painting, part D.W. Griffith biblical epic, but with one lady-in-waiting in a Renaissance dress. Paulina wears a costume with rows of ruffles in the skirt, possibly formed by layers of tunics and a top resembling a brassiere, all of which vaguely resembles an ancient Minoan statue or a Tanagra.

Thanhouser’s adaptation is an intelligible version of the play, with side stories and characters (including Mamillius, Time, and the bear) omitted for speed and clarity. The statue scene is missing from the DVD, because the available celluloid copy had lost its final frames. There are invented scenes including one set in prison, where Hermione and her ladies prepare the baby for Paulina to present to Leontes. There is no sense of tragedy, only maternal tenderness as she showers the baby (whose face is not seen) with kisses. A second invented scene is inserted after the trial, reassuringly showing Hermione alive and with Paulina. The intertitle cards are intelligently devised and the easily read descriptions keep to the basic plot: jealous husband, a pregnant wife falsely accused of adultery, imprisonment, banished infant, forbidden young lovers, a prince and a shepherd’s daughter who is actually the banished royal baby, a recognition scene, a reunion and a happy ending. It evinced ‘unusual enthusiasm’ for its time.Footnote ⁸¹ A Moving Picture World review, titled ‘Thanhouser Triumph’, called it a ‘masterpiece’ and praised its ‘magnificence of mounting, costumes, and the like of which Mr. Thanhouser has taken full advantage’.Footnote ⁸²

Modernism: Lillah McCarthy 1912

In her 1933 memoir, Myself and My Friends, Lillah McCarthy (1875–1960) describes how between 1912 and 1914 she shared the management of two theatres, and appeared in a production at a third, the Savoy, London, where she worked with her long-time theatre colleague and husband (from 1906 to 1918) Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946) on his revolutionary productions of The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night (she played Hermione and Viola). She writes that the Shakespeare season at the Savoy ‘brought me the happiest experience which an actress can have: the playing in company with a splendid cast and enthusiasm of those whose judgement is as sure as it is generous’.Footnote ⁸³ The latter may be her veiled reference to Granville-Barker, who had issued an injunction forbidding her to make any reference whatsoever in her memoir to him or his production associates, threatening legal action if she did. This was a major challenge considering how deeply their careers had been intertwined and the importance of that shared work, which included innovative Shakespeare productions and early involvement with George Bernard Shaw’s plays.

Among the many pleasures of the memoir is watching McCarthy skilfully negotiate the well-known stories of Granville-Barker’s productions with information that shifts the focus away from the ‘genius playwright, actor, producer’, to include other people involved in the productions. McCarthy praises designers Albert RutherstonFootnote ⁸⁴ (costumes) and Norman Wilkinson (sets) who ‘never did finer work than in designing costumes and scenery’ for The Winter’s Tale. She notes in connection to the production, that ‘There were many changes from the star-actor-manager’s way of producing Shakespeare’. This refers to the streamlined single set and thrust stage introduced with this production, but perhaps also to Granville-Barker himself. When she writes of her conversations with Rutherston on the costumes, it suggests her influence on him to change Granville-Barker’s design plans described in his ‘Prefaces’. The producer planned costumes that would be Renaissance-classic ‘as Shakespeare saw it’ and considered the designer in complete agreement, especially after they had ‘looked up the artist Giulio Romano’ and ‘there the costumes were much as we had forethought them’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This is not at all what the actual, costumes looked like. J. L. Styan sums them up as ‘Headgear flaunted preposterous plumes, legs were bare with gold and silver boots, dress was boldly embroidered and bespangled’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Instead of ‘Renaissance classic’ they showed the strong influence of Leon Bakst’s costume designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company, particularly their Scheherazade (1911). The costumes were among the production’s heavily debated innovations. This modernist Winter’s Tale had a virtually uncut text and a simple white set, designed by Wilkinson, featuring a backdrop of arches hung with gold, damask curtained and a bare stage with low platform at the back with five steps down. This was used for all scenes and simple changes in props identified new locations. The Spectator had reservations about the verse speaking, but applauded this elimination of lengthy scene changes, saying that Granville-Barker ‘has shown that an Elizabethan play can be acted without cuts in three hours’ and called it ‘the most interesting Shakespeare revival that has been seen within the memory of this generation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ There were objections to incompatibility between Rothenstein’s costumes and Wilkinson’s more austere set. The designer’s choice of strong colours also continued the late-Victorian love of bright shades available through aniline dyes from the 1860s onward. The Westminster Gazette (23 September 1912) praised the way the white set formed ‘a delightful background for the costumes [ …. ] One had a kind of complicated poem of moving colour of a depth greater than that of precious stones’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The fantasy created by this exoticism brings to mind fancy dress parties with Arabian Nights themes, made popular at the time by Paul Poiret’s ‘One Thousand and Second Night’ fete in 1911.Footnote ⁸⁹

One traditional element remained: Hermione was heavily pregnant when she entered upstage centre in 1.2 and walked down the steps followed by a servant, in a feathered turban, who held a silken parasol trimmed with tassels over her head.

In contrast to the brightly coloured costumes of the court and its courtiers, Hermione’s costume was a simple variation of antique dress in white or cream. In Figure 2, the Daily Mirror Studios photograph, a full-length studio portrait, emphasizes the simplicity of the dress and accessories. The bulky shape of her pregnancy is highlighted by a sash that drapes down from the hips to outline the outer edges of the belly. Like the other costumes, it was from no geographical place, nor historical time. Its lines are reminiscent of Byzantium or Assyrian drawings seen in Walter Crane’s and Edmund Dulac’s book illustrations.Footnote ⁹⁰ It included a light silk mantle (or shawl) that when she entered was arranged hanging down over her arms, increasing the resemblance to a Poiret robe. Hermione had only one other costume, worn in the third act trial scene, a hooded cape over a loose smock. According to the production photographs, Hermione wore the pregnancy dress again as her statue costume in the fifth act. This is unique, but possibly an aspect of breaking away from the overloaded details of Kean’s and Anderson’s, spectacular productions. It does present a small conflict with Shakespeare’s text because when Leontes exclaims: ‘O, thus she stood, / Even with such majesty – warm life, /As now it coldly stands – ’, he also says she looks as ‘when I first wooed her’ (5.3.34-36). Since this is an experimental and revolutionary production, would that detail of when he first saw her justify the cost and fuss of the third costume?

Figure 2 Visible Pregnancy 1912. Lillah McCarthy (Hermione) in costume for scenes 1.2, 2.1 and 5.3, director Harley Granville-Barker, designer Albert Rutherston.

Image courtesy of Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Figure 2Long description

The photo conveys the character rather than a specific scene in the production. McCarthy’s pose is dramatic and her expression enigmatic. Her body is slightly angled to the right, but she faces left. The angle hides her right arm, but the left is fully displayed as it stretches down her side. The left hand is turned forward with the thumb and first finger pointing downwards. The dress’s train is gathered in front of her. The text below the photo reads: Photograph by Daily Mirror Studios. LILLAH McCARTHY AS HERMIONE in The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare, at The Savoy Theatre 1912. Design by Albert Rutherston.

Figure 2 shows the actress as George Bernard Shaw has described her: ‘She was beautiful, plastic, statuesque, most handsome made, and seemed to have come straight from the Italian or eighteenth-century stage without a trace of the stuffiness of the London cup-and-saucer theatres’.

McCarthy may have been the first modern Hermione, rejecting earlier sentimentality and bringing to the role a strong flavour of the Shavian ‘New Woman’. Shaw had wanted to find another Sarah Siddons to play his women, and felt he had found her with McCarthy. He could have been describing Hermione when he wrote: ‘The horrible artificiality of that impudent sham the Victorian womanly woman, a sham manufactured by men for men, and duly provided by the same for the same with a bulbously overclothed “modesty” more lascivious than any frank sensuality.’Footnote ⁹¹

Disappearing Visibility: Disappearing Pregnancy 1931–1960

McCarthy was the last of the significantly visibly pregnant Hermione until past the middle of the twentieth century. The following decades saw visible pregnancy melt away into near invisibility.

Productions at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre between 1931 and 1960 are representative of the decline in a visible pregnancy. In 1931 Dorothy Massingham (Hermione) in W. Bridges Adams’ regal and formal production did have a pregnancy curve in her simple medieval costume.Footnote ⁹² In the single available photograph (by Claude Harris, Regent Street, London) she draws attention to her pregnant shape by resting an elegant hand just above the nicely rounded, discreet bump. In Anthony Quayle’s 1948 production the sets and costumes were designed by Motley (Margaret Harris, Sophia Harris, and Elizabeth Montgomery) who chose a Russian milieu that was part Bakst, and part illustrated Russian fairy tale. The Times thought the Sicilian scene’s ‘Asiatic setting is not only strange and beautiful itself but the strangeness suits’ the tale (7 June 1948). The Manchester Guardian complained that the spectacle of Sicilia made Bohemia look dull in comparison (7 June 1948). Photographs show Diana Wynyard as a young and less formal queen, with little or no pregnancy shape. She is shown with Mamillius on her lap, laughing and hugging him so closely to her chest that there would not have been room for a pregnancy prosthesis. She would be similarly flat-ish bellied in Peter Brook’s 1951 production.

The ultimate lack of visible pregnancy was Elizabeth Sellars’ costume in 1960. As seen in Figure 3, there is a once-upon-a-time fairy tale quality to her tall gold crown and the dress. The photograph shows an unornamented dark coloured Elizabethan-ish bodice worn over a gathered skirt in a lighter colour and fabric, and a diaphanous cloak that rests lightly on her shoulders. The bodice skims the torso, emphasizes the slim waist where it stops, but in front continues over her stomach in a smooth and faintly curved V shape. Even the slight indication of pregnancy seen in Jacques Noël’s original design has disappeared.Footnote ⁹³ As with Brook’s earlier production, the convention of visible pregnancy had been quietly diminished and then dropped in line with a societal construction that bracketed off the presence of pregnant women. It was rare to see a major character in either classic or modern dramas appear pregnant. When they did they were usually lower class, as in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1959, film 1961) and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, film 1961). A notable exception is the very pregnant young wife of a sailor, in a respectable working class family, in Noël Coward’s film In Which We Serve (1945), but she is a minor character. Television, broadcast into the home, was thought to require careful scrutiny and censorship about language pertaining to pregnancy. The weekly half-hour comedy I Love Lucy (1951–1957) on American television was the unique example that overcame prudery and incorporated the actress Lucille Ball’s actual pregnancy (1952) into the character. Ball was chief investor and producer, as well as the star of the very popular series. Her position was powerful enough to challenge the CBS network’s decision to cancel the programme when it learned of her pregnancy. With the commercial sponsor’s support, she insisted on the show continuing and the result was even higher ratings. But she did wear the smockFootnote ⁹⁴ and the word ‘pregnant’ was never used. The pregnancy was announced in the press as Ball being ‘enceinte’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Figure 3 No Visible Pregnancy 1960. Elizabeth Sellars (Hermione), director Peter Wood, designer Jacques Noël.

Photo: Angus McBean ©Houghton Library, Harvard University

Peter Brook 1951

The most important mid-century version of The Winter’s Tale was Peter Brook’s 1951 production at the Phoenix Theatre, the Tennents/Arts Council entry in the Festival of Britain. The cast featured well-known actors: John Gielgud (Leontes), Diana Wynyard (Hermione), Flora Robson (Paulina). Brook created a scaled down bare-stage production with a thrust stage and modified Elizabethan costumes, designed by Sophie Fedorovitch, a designer noted for her ‘method of scrupulous elimination’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In this production that included eliminating visible pregnancy. The costume seen in Figure 4 is notable for its minimal gesture towards Hermione’s pregnancy. The production was well received by critics, popular with audiences and, unexpectedly, one of the festival’s most successful offerings; it set a record for a Winter’s Tale theatrical run, topping Mary Anderson’s record of 164 performances with its 167. The Sunday Express called it ‘magnificent Shakespeare’ (1 July 1951). Theatre World Annual 1952 praised the ‘delightful production’ and thought its ‘cast-iron box office success [was a] splendid example of Shakespeare’s evergreen appeal to the man in the street of every generation’. The Times reviewer found the ‘graceful, measured production, wholly free from personal caprice’ (which Brook was noted for) and praised Brook and the company for being ‘careful to veil the characters from too searching a psychology’ (28 June 1951). Michael Kustow quotes Ivor Brown’s comment in the Observer that it ‘leaves out Peter Brookishness and is admirably simple and quick’.Footnote ⁹⁷ According to J. C. Trewin: ‘For years there had not been in London a less ostentatious production of Shakespeare.’Footnote ⁹⁸

Figure 4 Disappearing Pregnancy 1951. Brewster Mason (Polixenes), Diana Wynyard (Hermione), in background, John Gielgud (Leontes), director Peter Brook, designer Sophie Fedorovitch.

Photo: Angus McBean ©Houghton Library, Harvard University

Wynyard’s Hermione was ‘magnificent’ (Daily Express 28 June 1951) and ‘coolly statuesque even before her translation in delicate pink draperies – a vision not to be forgotten’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Her 1948 performance of Hermione at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, directed by Anthony Quayle, had received similar enthusiastic reviews.

Fedorovitch’s costumes were rich but sombre for Sicilia, which in Angus McBean’s photographs appears only as a dark background. Wynyard’s blonde hair and fair skin are the two surfaces that catch the light in most of these pictures. Figure 4, where Polixenes kneels before Hermione who playfully holds a toy dagger to his heart, is an exception. His embroidered doublet is light coloured, and also establishes the Elizabethan period more clearly than Hermione’s generic costume does. Its main signifier of the period is the small stand-up lace collar (a rebato) at the back of the neckline. The regal Wynyard wears a dark velvet dress with a close-fitting bodice, tight sleeves, a slender waist, and a belt that crosses horizontally across her flattish abdomen. It is a hybrid that both has and has not a visible pregnancy. Under the dress a roll of padding is placed around the hips allowing the skirt to drape slightly outward, but evenly, and with no evident pregnancy. Even this bit of bulk is not always visible in reproductions of the image because the area is shadowed. It also disappears when the printed photo is cropped just below the waist. The costume reflects the 1950s prudish social conventions regarding visible pregnancy, but more influential was Brook’s own agenda. Given the conventions of the times, it may not have occurred to him or Fedorovitch to shape Hermione realistically. It is possible that Brook was simply not interested in the size of a pregnant belly, and indifferent to the way it could affect a performance. He used a similar Elizabethan-style costume with no sign of pregnancy for Juliet’s first appearance in Measure for Measure.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

His staging experiment with The Winter’s Tale introduced the stripped-down style that would come to define his work as a director/producer. The costume choices are conventional Shakespearean. Non-visible pregnancy may be Brook’s deliberate choice, an element in his mix of conforming and not conforming with convention.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Writing in Vogue Siriol Hugh-Jones summed up the production’s effect: ‘Having delighted, ravished and infuriated us in former productions with fabulous crowd skirmishing, shock effects, thistledown elegancies of style, and occasionally bloody-minded naughtiness, he now straightens his box of bricks into neat piles to build scaffolding for the play, and nothing but the play.’Footnote ¹⁰² Omitting visible pregnancy may be part of the neat pattern, and certainly no one objected to the glamourous trim-waisted Hermione. However, a few years later there were two North American productions where visible pregnancy was glamourous, even if unnoticed. In the 1950s and 1960s pregnancy was still dealt with discreetly, not a topic for public conversation, or as some would argue, even for public presentation. Prohibitions and inhibitions were beginning to change, especially when the feminist movement brought the female body into political discourse. The two designs that reintroduced visible pregnancy were early signs that the social thaw that had been coming slowly, was now on the horizon.

A Glimpse of Visible Pregnancy: Stratford, Ontario 1958, NYC 1963

The two North American productions of The Winter’s Tale were the Stratford Festival, Ontario in 1958 (designed by Tanya Moisiewitch, directed by Donald Campbell) and the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City in 1963 (designed by Theoni V. Aldredge, directed by Gladys Vaughn). Both were summer Shakespeare festivals. Stratford Ontario’s began in 1952, opened its permanent theatre in 1957, and was the more established of the two. New York City’s festival was the work of Joe Papp, founder of the off-Broadway Public Theater. Papp, committed to bringing free outdoor summer Shakespeare to the city, opened the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1962. For both companies this was their second season in their own theatres and their first production of The Winter’s Tale. In 1963 a third summer festival in Stratford, Connecticut also included the play, but there seems to be no accessible record of Hermione’s costumes.

Tracking costumes with visible pregnancies through photographs is not always reliable. For example, there are two photographs in the Ontario Festival’s archives of the 1958 Hermione (Charmion King) in 1.2. Her costume, a sumptuous collation of fabrics and jewels, included a visible pregnancy, but in the image where the queen sits the pregnancy is not visible. In the other image, where she stands, the pregnancy is large and emphasized by Hermione’s left arm curved under the belly, barely touching it, while her right arm rested just above it. The pose for this photo, which was used for publicity, is reminiscent of seventeenth-century pregnancy portraits, including some of Van Dyck’s paintings of Henrietta Maria.Footnote ¹⁰³ Dennis Behl, working with the festival’s costume bible, describes Hermione’s dress for 1.2 as ‘tangerine-shot taffeta with sleeves appliqued in gold, pearls, and studs. White marquisette was used at the neck and sleeve; a pale pink and yellow-shot organza drape completed the costume’. She also wore a tiara, had jewels intertwined in her hair, a necklace hooked to the bodice, shoulder broches, rings, and golden slippers. He notes that ‘Padding indicated her pregnancy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For 2.1, the nursery scene, the court robes were removed, and replaced by a blue velvet robe with brown fur trim over a blue underrobe. In the trial scene the costume drawing shows her with her hands chained behind her back; the costume is a duplicate of the underrobe, now stained and distressed, the pregnancy padding removed. Her diminished splendour included a veil of pale grey silk jersey hung from her hair; a length of mushroom-coloured tricot hung from her shoulders.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

All of the production’s costumes were elaborate and placed the play in an eclectic, lush mix of periods.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The staging irritated the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson who objected to Campbell’s ‘emphasis on seeing – on spectacular processions with flambeaux, big court scenes with many attendants [ … ] stunning costumes, ornate properties’ that placed the visual over dramatic interpretation and made ‘the innocent play of The Winter’s Tale almost an afterthought’ (22 July 1958). In the Shakespeare Quarterly Arnold Edinborough complained that the director had missed the serious symbolism of the play and left it a confusing ‘rag bag of a play’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Five years later another fully pregnant Hermione appeared on stage when The Winter’s Tale, directed by Gladys Vaughan, was included in New York Shakespeare Theater’s 1963 season in Central Park. The New York Times’ review included a photograph of Salome Jens (Hermione) in a simple medieval/Renaissance dress with a clearly defined pregnancy curve. The play would have been unknown to many in the socially mixed New York audience. British theatrical conventions were irrelevant here, and a visibly pregnant Hermione was as crucial for this audience to follow the story as it had been for Tanhouser’s film. The costume was simple, undecorated, and had a mixed medieval and Renaissance silhouette that was slim on the body except where it was rounded out by the pregnancy. The neckline was discretely scooped; the sleeves tight and the fabric heavy enough to flow smoothly over the belly. The fabric looks rich, but, considering the company’s limited budget, it was probably purchased at bargain prices in the city’s garment district. Alice Griffin in Shakespeare Quarterly complained about the distracting lack of an overall design style which made her feel this ‘could only have been inspired by a turn-of-the-century production where each costume was [as] opulent and striking as possible, without stressing character and mood’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But questions of costumes and historic periods were a frequent complaint in reviews during the second half of the twentieth century. Some reviewers still longed for the ancient world as the correct setting for this play, while others objected to eclectic mixes, or wanted more of the fable/fairy tale quality. By the end of the century a comfortable mid-Victorian or Romanov period had become one of the most popular settings, as seen in Gregory Doran’s version in 1999 and Kenneth Branagh’s in 2015. It became nearly as standard for productions as the classical world had been. Among its merits was the fashionable accommodation of large pregnancies in beautiful dresses.

Visibility Returns: Judi Dench, Trevor Nunn, RSC 1969

Trevor Nunn’s RSC production of The Winter’s Tale in 1969 was a breakthrough in many ways: sets, lights, verse speaking, contemporary values, absence of pomp and ceremony. The youthfulness of the royals as a modern family was a major theme. When the stage lights came up Leontes, Hermione and Polixenes entered laughing, and playing tag with Mamillius.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Hermione and Perdita were doubled for the first time since Mary Anderson in 1887, and Hermione’s costume included a very pronounced visible pregnancy, possibly for the first time in four decades in the United Kingdom. Ronald Bryden summed up the family’s domesticity: ‘The young father kindles with pride in his small son. His wife, the shape of a coming child swelling her white gown, glows like a pearl with contentment as she watches them play’ (Observer 18 May 1969).

This time the inclusion of an accurately sized pregnancy silhouette had a wide-reaching and permanent impact. It was the turning point after which, with minor variations, this became the consistent practice for Hermione’s costume in 1.2 and 2.1, no matter what the setting or the period. The thin pregnancy cushion disappeared without anyone noticing, and it has not returned. Here, as seen throughout this brief history, the visible pregnancy of Hermione coincided with, or was subtly directed by, cultural and social attitudes. This included a loosening of social prohibitions, altered conventions of propriety, the ‘sexual revolution’. The clothes-shedding musical Hair proclaimed it the ‘Age of Aquarius’. The law in the UK ended homosexuality’s illegality and abolished theatre censorship, including the ban on nudity.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The emergence of ‘youth culture’ in the 1960s created a revolution in fashion. A creative mix of invention and retro emerged that both inspired and changed the way many young people dressed. Rock stars set the style, but so did clothing by young British designers including: Mary Quant, modern crisp, cheap and mini-skirted; Laura Ashley, Edwardian romantic, long and flowing; and Vivienne Westwood, fancy Teddy Boys evolving into grunge. Freedom of choice was the guideline, and this was the way director Trevor Nunn and designer Christopher Morley, both in their twenties, dressed The Winter’s Tale. Sicilia’s young royals could have been playing dress-up in inherited Regency clothing just as London’s young aristocrats were doing with finds from ancestral trunks in the attic. The costumes were an unexpected version of counter-culture dress.

Trevor Nunn used the production to make a bold statement of the direction he wanted the company to follow. He replaced Peter Hall’s political focus with one that paid greater attention to the play’s social and familial aspects, all to be done with the simplest of sets, and with a resident group of actors. It was the beginning of an era in the theatre where it became ‘easier to recall directors rather the actors’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The production was ‘the most significant and effective embodiment’ of the director’s commitment to ‘modernity and seriousness [ …. ] capturing the spirit of the times while reasserting the play’s centrality in the canon’.Footnote ¹¹² Innovations included replacing the courtiers’ opening scene with the disembodied voice of Time; casting the same actress for Hermione and Perdita; staging the sheep shearing as a hippie Be-In; making Time a man in a plexiglass box illuminated by strobe lights; and dimming lights so the audience saw what Leontes imagined. The music was Indian sitars in Sicilia and rock in Bohemia. Critical reception of Nunn’s experiment was mixed, as might be expected. Typical of positive reviews of the emphasis on youth was Gareth Lloyd Evans in the Guardian who welcomed ‘the near-miracle of illuminating and preserving Shakespeare’s text with a thoroughly contemporary interpretation’ (17 May 1969). John Barber praised ‘the impact of reality [that] was lent to the situation by setting the opening scene in the Palace nursery’ (Telegraph 17 May 1969). In the Daily Express, Herbert Kretzmer applauded it as ‘a magical production’ (16 May 1969). Less enthusiastic critics disliked the ‘bland’/‘sterile’/‘antiseptic’/stark white tiled box set and objected that Nunn ‘got carried away by his visual gimmicks’. J. C. Trewin in the Birmingham Post complained about the omission of the opening scene, the lights, the set, and the ‘irritating costumes’ (18 May 1969).

This was the year before the first Glastonbury Festival, and Morley’s designs for dress in Bohemia were hippie-inspired. Barefoot and long-haired the shepherds had ‘Red Indian headbands and bare midriffs’ (J. W. Lambert, The Times 18 May 1969). The even longer-haired shepherdesses mixed brightly coloured sarongs, skimpy tops, and miniskirts with hippie flair.

Reviewers found Sicilia’s all-white clothing more challenging to identify with a specific historical period. The setting was a bare stage in a white box, but the whiteness of its props – even the large rocking horse – and costumes (seen in Figure 5) implied modernity. For Patricia E. Tatspaugh, the ‘whiteness of set, properties (and programme) and the pseudo-Regency costumes suggested innocence, purity and winter’.Footnote ¹¹³ There was, however, one note of colour. In black-and-white photographs of the scene it is easy to miss that Polixenes wore a red jacket. It linked him to the colours in Bohemia, but also identified him as the outsider in this family group. The royals’ retro-Regency costumes puzzled some writers as to historical nomenclature: Leontes’ court was said to be dressed in ‘Kate Greenaway clothes’ (Philip Hope-Wallace, Guardian, 3 July 1970) and, more accurately, the men were described dressed as ‘Regency beaux’ (Sunday Telegraph 18 May 1969). Hilary Spurling in the Spectator thought that everything, including the men’s ruffled shirts, flared jackets and high-waisted trousers … suggests the youth, wealth and arrogance of the Sicilian court’ (23 May 1969). The clearest identification of the director’s and designer’s purpose is Martin Esslin’s review in the New York Times:

Figure 5 Visible Pregnancy Returns 1969, costumes for Acts 1 and 2, Barrie Ingham (Leontes), Judi Dench (Hermione), Richard Pasco (Polixenes), director Trevor Nunn, designer Christopher Morley.

Photo: Reg Wilson ©RSC

It was essential for the successful doubling that Hermione and Perdita should appear as different from each other as possible.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Learning about Mary Anderson’s production had suggested the doubling to Nunn. Dench’s Hermione and Perdita were complete opposites in hair, dress, posture, attitude, movement, and accent. Hermione’s Regency style is elegant, witty but controlled, her expression serene. The visible pregnancy defined her. Her dress was undecorated, smooth-surfaced without frills, with long sleeves that hugged the arm and a discreetly curved neckline without lace, ruffles, or other trim. Designed in the manner of Regency fashion it had a simple gathering under the bust from which the body of the dress sloped smoothly down to the floor to form a modest circle that widened into the merest hint of a train around the back. Figure 5 shows that the well-developed pregnancy seemed especially present when she sat and the dress’s fabric draped toward the side, forming a soft deep fold on either side of the belly, drawing the eye to its roundness.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Gareth Lloyd Evans’ Guardian review is representative of critical acclaim for the casting: ‘Judi Dench’s doubling as Perdita and Hermione achieves, especially as the latter, a presence which touches greatness’ (17 May 1969).

The RSC and SBT Collections confirm that the original costume no longer exists, and there is no known copy of the costume bible and no accessible video of the performance. There is, however, the promptbook and an extensive collection of photographs give a valuable picture of how the dress worked in performance. These include works by an unusually long list of photographers for an RSC production.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Most of the pictures feature the rocking horse, the white boxes that served as seats and a toy box, Leontes, Polixenes, and at the centre Dench’s Hermione, radiantly content and very visibly pregnant. In Bohemia Dench’s teenage Perdita was all Botticelli billowing dress and flowing long hair. That was the striking image used for posters. But black-and-white versions set in the nursery were the primary ones used in publicity images at the time and remain the standard illustrations of, among Nunn’s many new devices, a highly emphasized presence of Hermione’s pregnancy.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Sometimes a costume’s history has its own narrative. If there is a romance to that history, as Barbara Hodgdon claims can happen, then this 1969 costume, imagined by Trevor Nunn, designed by Christopher Morley, worn by Judi Dench, has just such a story.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Drawing on a dress someone had seen and remembered for eighteen years is the stuff of the theatre’s romance.

Judi Dench Remembers:

The Unborn Child as New Character

The visibly gravid body encourages the audience to consider this presence as an entity that needs to be kept safe. Watching a heavily pregnant Hermione makes her vulnerability clearer and reinstates the part of her pregnant body that had been missing in performances between 1919 and 1969. As a stage property, the belly’s extension can be embraced, stroked, protected, and be a place for Hermione to rest her arms. It also changes the way her body moves, sits, and stands. Just as an actor playing Falstaff needs to adjust to the fat suit, a Hermione needs to adjust to a pregnancy prosthesis. The size of the prosthesis is always the director’s and actor’s decision, and not that of the designer. Differently sized prostheses offer varying possibilities: Claire Skinner’s modern-dressed Hermione at the National Theatre in 2001was comfortable in high-end casual clothing and carried her visible belly lightly. In Cheek by Jowl’s modern dress production in 2017 Natalie Radmall-Quirke’s movements were restricted by her form-fitting jersey dress and enormous pregnancy. At the RSC Alexandra Gilbreath in 1999 could hardly move under the combined weight of the pregnancy and Romanov-era dress. Also at the RSC, Kelly Hunter in 2009 worked with a belly size she remembered from her own pregnancy, as did Gemma Jones in 1981, and Samantha Bond played the role during several months of her actual pregnancy in 1992. Actors talk about communicating during the performance with the prosthetic bump as though it were a living child. Imagined movements by the baby, such as a shift, a slight kick, or a false birth contraction, make Hermione pause to catch her breath, steady herself, gasp audibly, to reach out for a hand, and sometimes that hand belongs to Polixenes.

The presence of the prosthetic pregnant belly in 1969 introduced new ways for actors to develop Hermione’s relationships with Leontes, Polixenes, and Mamillius. Some of the most significant and innovative uses of the prosthesis are found in productions during the decades immediately following Nunn’s production. For example, Alexandra Gilbreath’s Hermione in Gregory Doran’s 1999 production was deeply invested in the restrictions and discomfort of her vast pregnant belly. It made her waddle when she walked, threw her off balance when she danced with Polixenes, caused her to sit with thighs spread apart, and to rest against the settee to relieve her back. She put Leontes’ hand lovingly on the belly but his tremor cordis began when she waltzed with Polixenes, even though she kept a discreet arms-length between them. The dancing stopped when she had a series of small contractions that made her lean on him for support. These coincided with Leontes expressing jealousy, heard by the audience but not by Hermione. When the pains caused her to give a small moan, Leontes, down stage, misheard it as sexual. In David Farr’s 2009 production, Kelly Hunter’s Hermione and Darrell D’Silva’s Polixenes have a relaxed, casual intimacy. There is just enough physical contact to be innocent but still affect a jealous mind. She easily takes his hand when talking to him. She puts her hand on his brow during their courtly dance, where they are close but with very little actual contact. She is pleased when he puts his ear to her belly, and so comfortable with him that she bumps him playfully with her belly when teasing him: ‘Verily / You shall not go’ (1.2.50).

Who is allowed to touch this pregnant queen’s belly? Social guidelines for physical contact establish who is permitted to touch a person’s body (and where), but different physical conditions can intensify the meaning of a gesture, as pregnancy does in performances of The Winter’s Tale. Putting a hand on the gestating belly is an intimate gesture that can signify a close relationship. When Hermione places Leontes’ hand there, as Gilbreath did, it is a sign of affection that acknowledges their shared bond with the unborn child. When Kelly Hunter’s Hermione hugs Mamillius and places his hand there it is to connect him with the baby. The same gesture becomes more complicated when it is Polixenes’ hand. It is one thing if his relationship is attentive, handing Hermione her shawl, or taking her hand, but another thing if Hermione offers this level of hand-on-the-body intimacy, even if it is only meant as a gesture of fond friendship. Details and actions such as this in one way or another have been present in nearly every performance of The Winter’s Tale since 1969. Some productions have used interactions with the heavily pregnant body as triggers for Leontes’ jealousy. For example, in 1981 at the RSC when Patrick Stewart’s Leontes placed his head on Hermione’s lap, the belly’s size left little room for him, Ray Jewers’ Polixenes then placed his own head on the other side of the lap, as though he shared equal access. At Stratford, Ontario in 1986 (set in a regal European court sometime in the 1830s) Goldie Semple’s Hermione felt her baby kick, and Stephen Russell’s Polixenes ‘instinctively, solicitously, moved [his hand] to the place. It was bound to inflame Leontes to see evidence of “affection” in the sense of sexual instinct’.Footnote ¹³⁰ At the RSC in 1986, Penny Downie ‘offered an exceptionally flirtatious and ingratiating Hermione, on whom Paul Greenwood’s Polixenes lavished cuddles, back-rubs, and love-lorn gazes’.Footnote ¹³¹ Gilbreath’s Hermione shared a comfortably physical friendship with Ken Bones’ Polixenes who acknowledged her condition’s need for innocent attentions (a hand held, a peck on the cheek) while Antony Sher’s Leontes ignored them and buried himself in paperwork. When Hermione left her shawl on the settee, the men’s contrasting handling of it mimicked the way they treated her: Leontes crumpled it and sniffed for evidence of adultery, then threw it down. Later in the scene Polixenes picked it up, smoothed and folded it, then carried it over his arm while talking with Camillo, before putting it back. These are some of the elements in the background of Leontes’ jealousy, but rarely the actual cause, which remains inexplicable.

Males Behaving Badly: Leontes and Mamillius

Leontes is always dangerous to Hermione and the unborn child. He becomes an even greater physical threat if she is big-bellied: she cannot move quickly, cannot rise easily when pushed to the floor, cannot defend herself against slaps if she needs her hands to protect the baby. His attacks on his wife are also life-threatening to the unborn child. The Leontes of Patrick Stewart (1981), John Nettles (1992), and Antony Sher (1999) in RSC productions and Cheek by Jowl’s Orlando James (2016–2017) have been among the most menacing. For each of them Leontes, who is convinced this is not his baby, is enraged by the sight of his wife’s pregnant body; he tells his courtiers to ‘let her sport herself / With that she’s big with’ and tells Hermione ‘tis Polixenes / Has made thee swell thus’ (2.1.60-2). The following section draws on these four actors, and Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet (2016), to demonstrate some of the ways that Leontes and Mamillius react aggressively to the unborn child.

Patrick Stewart

Leontes’ physical abuse of Hermione has been increasingly highlighted in productions, especially when the director makes connections with current discussions of domestic violence, and, in the following examples, it is always closely linked to a significantly visible pregnancy. Actors come to Leontes’ violence by different routes. Antony Sher’s research in psychology, for example, showed him the dangerous insanity of the tremor cordis; Patrick Stewart, however, had seen it in his own father’s behaviour. Even standing by his father’s body in a coffin, Stewart felt as if the man ‘might, at any moment, sit up and hit me’.Footnote ¹³³ His Leontes viewed in the performance recording is full of small, scattered acts of violence directed at Hermione. This is a very dangerous Leontes with clenched fists held rigidly at his side trying not to strike, controlling an almost overwhelming fury that is directed, in part, at the extended belly. John Barber in the Daily Telegraph thought it was a brilliant account of the role, including ‘a real fit [that] leaves him tearful and gasping for breath, taking refuge behind a sardonic hideous grin and wild accusations’ (2 July 1981). What Barber does not mention is the attacks on Hermione’s body. The production opens with the exuberant finale of a court masque with Polixenes and Hermione as its king and queen, exiting off stage, followed by a cast of pastoral shepherds, shepherdesses, peasants, a dancing bear, courtiers, and musicians. An overexcited Leontes acts as the conductor, leading, directing, and, finally, applauding as Mamillius bursts triumphantly through an upstage screen, but even here Leontes seems to be on the outside directing actions that have little to do with him. The masque’s high spirits, childish games, and courtly tradition create a mood that quickly changes for Leontes who begins a series of small attacks.

The first blow comes after the masque ends, while they are still in their masque costumes seen in Figure 6. Hermione is sitting with Mamillius on her left and Polixenes on her right. When Leontes enters and sees no room for him, he stands behind Hermione and pokes her repeatedly in the back. These jabs are mean, aggressive, hurt enough to make her yelp. A second attack comes soon after, when Leontes kneels beside the seated Hermione and the baby’s bulk keeps him from placing his head next to her breast. It angers him that even in the womb this ‘bastard’ seems to push him away. When he does manage to place his head on her lap, she wraps her arm maternally around him. Polixenes then kneels on her other side, puts his head on the already crowded lap, and Hermione also puts her arm around him. Leontes’ irritation mounts when Hermione teases Polixenes: ‘you slipped not / With any but with us’ (1.2.85). When Leontes asks, ‘Is he won yet?’ (1.2.85-6), he begins another series of pokes and little jabs, starting at his wife’s back, but now increasing the menace by moving around her. When he pokes at the belly with two hands, Mamillius draw his toy sword ready to defend his mother. The blow comes when Leontes strikes Hermione as he remembers the ‘three crabbed months’ it took her to ‘clap thyself my love’ and utter ‘I am yours for ever’. On ‘yours forever’ (1.2.102-4), he pulls her hand out arms-length, then slaps it hard. When four lines later Hermione says that acceptance earned her ‘a royal husband’ and ‘for some while a friend’ Polixenes’ reaction is the opposite of Leontes’. He kisses her cheek, embraces her briefly, and leads her away. Not all of Leontes’ threats are physical attacks; he is dangerous even when disdainfully holding up the long sleeve of her robe.

In 2.1 Leontes’ invasion into the nursery matches his vicious verbal attack with physical abuse that neither the courtiers who accompanied him nor Hermione’s women are able to stop. When Hermione, puzzled by his behaviour, asks, ‘What is this? Sport?’ Stewart’s response, directed to the attendants is that she should ‘sport herself / With that she’s big with’ and then, to Hermione, ‘Polixenes / Has made thee swell thus’ (2.1.58; 60-2). With that Leontes shoves her with force from behind. When he announces to the room, ‘She’s an adulteress’ (2.1.76), he pushes his knee into her side, dangerously near the baby. With that final assault, he races off and then storms back stopping short of actually hitting her. Hermione exits to prison accompanied by her ladies, and, unlike later productions, with no indication of the beginning of a premature birth.

John Nettles

The 1992 RSC production, directed by Adrian Noble, with John Nettles (Leontes), Samantha Bond (Hermione), and Paul Jesson (Polixenes), can be viewed in a rather blurred performance recording filmed from the back of theatre. In the promptbook the stage manager’s pencilled notes for 1.2 and 2.1 clearly map a series of escalating physical attacks where the pregnancy prosthesis (the unborn child) is Leontes’ target. On the promptbook’s page 74 there is a note indicating that on the words ‘that she’s big of’ (1.2.61) Leontes ‘stands behind her with his arms round her on her “bump”’. The threat is that he will pull the arms too hard and tight, harming the baby. On page 75 beside ‘O thou thing’ the note indicates: ‘Leontes hits Hermione & she falls down (or kneels) / Mamilius runs forward & shouts “No” but is pulled back by Lady (SJ) and they exit stage right followed by Lord (GW) / 3 ladies cross & kneel round’. Page 76 makes it clear how menacing Leontes is, especially each time that he stands behind Hermione. Between the play’s lines 99 and 125 the stage manager notes that ‘Leontes crosses and kneels behind Hermione – kisses the back of her neck – stands and turns to face her – she stands and has a birth contraction (braxton hicks). Hermione turns to go but stops and turns back to face Leontes as the lords move out of the way and the women exit’.Footnote ¹³⁴

Some of Leontes’ jealousy in this production, as well as in those of other directors, is also reflected in Mamillius’ reactions to the change in his mother’s body. Her once comfortably sized lap has no room for him now. His is a child’s uncertainty as to what the new baby will mean, fuelled by the first lady-in-waiting’s teasing: ‘The queen, your mother, rounds apace. We shall / Present our services to a fine new prince / One of these days, and then you’d wanton with us / If we would have you’ (2.1.15-18). The sibling rivalry is acted out in different ways in productions, but the pattern is fairly standard, and the size and visibility of the prosthesis are factors. Mamillius has a child’s privilege to embrace his mother, and in many productions his overactive behaviour, seems an anxious attempt to hold her attention. When he throws himself in his mother’s lap here, she pulls back and pushes him away to protect the baby. He is rejected, even if temporarily, when Hermione asks her ladies to ‘Take the boy to you. He so troubles me, / ‘Tis past enduring’ (2.1.01). The visible pregnancy becomes as threatening to him as it does to his father, and he sometimes enacts a child-size version of the parent’s violence. In the promptbook, pages 71–72, Mamillius is described as running to Hermione from stage right and circling around her as she enters centre stage. He then turns back, gets a cushion out of the basket of baby things, crosses back and hits Hermione a couple of times. When she takes the pillow from him, he runs into the sheet the ladies are folding, pretending to be a ghost. While one of the ladies is untangling Mamillius from the sheet, another is caring for the seated Hermione, first removing her shoes, then massaging her neck and shoulders. Afterwards, Hermione sits on the floor so Mamillius can whisper his ghost tale in her ear. When Leontes and his men enter, she rises with effort while Leontes pulls Mamillius away from her. The stage manager’s notes describing the pattern of his attack on her are quoted earlier.

Antony Sher

In Gregory Doran’s 1999 production with Alexandra Gilbreath, the first blow to Hermione’s body comes not, as might be expected from Antony Sher’s Leontes, but quite unexpectedly at the beginning of 2.1 from Mamillius (Emily Bruni who also played Perdita) and are seen clearly in the DVD.Footnote ¹³⁵ He is a sickly young prince, dressed in a copy of his father’s uniform, confined to a wheelchair, and adores his father’s masculine attention, especially their mock fights.Footnote ¹³⁶ Stuck in his wheelchair, the sickly boy is uncomfortable with his mother’s showers of kisses, an attention he is too old for. His age is vague but somewhere between twelve and fourteen. Earlier, 1.2, when Leontes stopped Hermione embracing the boy (the size of her belly and fullness of her dress were suffocating). Mamillius’ reaction was relief touched with disdain. Later he listens to Leontes’ accusations against his mother, but the boy does not show his response to them until the beginning of 2.1. Then, as Mamillius is wheeled in by an attendant and has his mother walking beside him, he deliberately strikes her breast. When he turns away (towards the audience and the camera), the satisfied look on his face shows it was deliberate. The blow startles Hermione who draws away, keeping her hand on the breast. He has bruised her emotionally and physically. She makes no reference to it, but it explains why she asks her ladies to take him away because ‘He bothers me’. Settled, she calls him back to her and prepares to hear his story. ‘There was a man … ’ is the cue for Leontes to storm into this already tense nursery.

Antony Sher was best known for what Paul Taylor called his dependable ability to ‘absolutely dominate the stage’, and the critic was surprised by Sher’s ‘rich and complex characterization’ of Leontes (Independent, 7 January 1999). Sher felt that ‘the rage and destructiveness in Leontes’ [isn’t about ] “evil” behaviour; this is about someone in trouble, in pain’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The restraint on physical violence in 1.2 was part of his control of the role in ‘an interpretation crammed with interpretive points’. In 1.2 the anger is directed at objects: he scratches a record by dragging the needle across it while Hermione and Polixenes dance; when Hermione leaves her shawl on the settee to walk with Polixenes, Leontes crumples it up after sniffing it for clues of adultery. His Leontes is ‘muted, tense and anxious, troubled rather than overwhelmed’ until he bursts into the nursery and turns his fury into an attack on Hermione’s body and the pregnancy. When he enters, just as Mamillius starts his story, his appearance shocks Hermione. She rises, but her attempts to embrace him are rejected. Instead, with his fist raised ready to strike, he pushes her across the stage with a series of shoves until she falls to the floor. She gets up slowly, keeping one hand on her belly and the other on her back. When she approaches her husband, he throws her back down. No one dares move to her rescue. When she holds out her hand in reconciliation, also asking for his help to stand, he refuses, stares, turns, and leaves. This has the impact of another blow, while the earlier one has started a painful miscarriage. She needs her ladies’ support as she exits, debilitated by the premature contractions.

Orlando James

Cheek by Jowl’s 2016 production, directed by Declan Donnellan, which foregrounded domestic violence, also used a blow resulting in a miscarriage. Orlando James’ Leontes is pathologically vicious, quick to anger, and brutal in attack, aligned with Tom Cawte’s equally pathologically distraught Mamillius, a boy weeping in anger, flailing in terror.Footnote ¹³⁸ Natalie Radmall-Quirke’s Hermione seems able to keep him in balance, at least before the tremor cordis strikes him. She handles his quirks skilfully, with affection and intelligence, but always keeping a watchful and apprehensive eye on both him and Mamillius.

She also carries a full-term pregnancy, accentuated by a body-hugging jersey dress seen in Figure 9, where the furious Leontes twists Hermione’s arm behind her back, forcing her body backwards; at that angle the pregnant belly fills the centre of the image. In the production there is no indication of where or when the action is taking place. The stage is bare except for a white-painted wooden crate, about eight feet long, that serves as a wide bench. The only backdrop is a partition made of similar narrow boards. Clothing is contemporary, but without the elegant casualness of cashmere sweaters and bespoke shoes seen in Nicholas Hytner’s Sicilian court. In Donnellan’s production both kings’ clothes could have come from the mid-price sales rack. Their ordinariness could make it seem of no particular importance, except that the designer Nick Ormerod is a master of the subtle use of contemporary dress. The clothing’s anonymity is deliberately puzzling. In the opening minutes there is a ‘dumb show’ where Leontes and Polixenes chase around and wrestle, and the only sound is their thudding feet. At that point, with Hermione and Mamillius looking on approvingly, it is not clear who is Sicilia and who is Bohemia. Eventually Leontes is identified as the more unbuttoned of the two, dressed in a button-down collar shirt with rolled-up sleeves and jeans, while Polixenes is more constrained in a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the wrist and neck, trousers and a dark tie knotted tightly at the throat. Mamillius is in standard adolescent ‘proper’ dress, in white shirt, tie, and trousers, but this suggests a separation from Leontes through its similarity to Polixenes’ clothes. In contrast to their casually dressed king, the palace staff (not present in 1.2) are dressed appropriately in well-tailored black suits for Camillo and other courtiers and black skirts, white blouses, and heels for Hermione’s ladies-in-waiting.

Figure 9 Leontes’ Rage 2017 Orlando James (Leontes) Natalie Radmall-Quirke (Hermione) Tom Cawte (Mamillius), director Declan Donnellen, designer Nick Ormerod.

Screen Grab, Cheek by Jowel’s livestream 2024.

Central to the action and motivation in 1.2 and 2.1, Hermione’s pregnancy costume (Figure 9) holds the viewer’s eye. The shape of the pregnancy prosthesis is large, certainly a sufficient size to hold a healthy well-developed baby who will be a ‘lusty babe, likely to live’ (2.2.25). The bulky belly extends out from Radmall-Quirke’s slender frame and makes it difficult for her to move. It seems to tire Hermione, who gives it nearly constant attention, stroking, wrapping arms around it, supporting it, or resting an arm or a hand there. It hampers, hinders, and distracts her. This has been true in other productions discussed here, but what makes it compelling and unique is the effect of her costume, a dress that clings so closely to the body’s shape that it seems to bring the baby forward, even into a place of danger. The question is why this particular, relatively ordinary, dress becomes so important. It is a type of dress that can be purchased at a range of prices, and hers looks moderately expensive. The quality of the fabric and the shape of the draped tucks over the bust suggest it is more Harvey Nichols or Saks Fifth Avenue than the High Street or local mall. Its style is still popular, eight years later, so there is nothing extraordinary about it then or now. The colour is a subtle brown/grey, the sleeves long, the jewellery a simple double strand of pearl-size beads at the modest neckline and small earrings. Her stockings are sheer and dark, her shoes mid-heeled and her hair in a simple, but well-styled, French twist. It is an appropriately polished look, but the body-clinging dress also reflects an extraordinary time for fashion in maternity dressing: the public presentation of the pregnant belly in a socially acceptable garment whose thinness accentuates the naked outline of its every curve. This plain dress sheaths Hermione’s body as if it were the body’s own skin. Its modern visual roots go back to the 1991 Vanity Fair cover by Annie Liebowitz featuring a naked Demi Moore, nine months pregnant, seated in profile. Publishing the photograph on the cover of a major magazine was a signifier of a cultural shift towards liberated pregnancy, although many found the cover shocking, and some newsstands refused to display it.Footnote ¹³⁹ Except, the shape of this Hermione’s body nearly bursting with pregnancy also evokes the primal images of ancient fertility carvings.

In the production, this primal image of pregnancy fits well with the intensity of Leontes’ and Mamillius’ anxiety-ridden fury. The space claimed by Hermione’s body, and her attention paid to it, displaced them. She has become an embodiment of the ancient female figure, fruitful in both body and mind, who would have been too powerful and, therefore, ‘threatening to the supremacy of male imagination’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Most critics, including Dominic Cavendish, thought Leontes was ‘suffering, plainly, from man-child feelings of displacement (Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2017). Adult actor Tom Cawte’s disturbed Mamillius (convincingly aged between twelve and fourteen) had even deeper behavioural disorders that resulted in his screaming tantrums and terrified rages. Stephen Purcell noted that the boy ‘seemed distressed by the thought of his mother’s pregnancy and [ …. ] that the king suffered from a similar disorder to his son’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Lynn Gardiner observed that ‘For both man and boy, love of Hermione goes hand-in-hand with possession of Hermione’ (Guardian, 4 October 2017). The queen is plagued by her son’s emotional imbalance, as well as the quiet thrumming undercurrent of Leontes’ volatility. In the nursery the boy throws himself on the floor in tantrums and the two ladies-in-waiting try to quiet him. The sobs and screams stop only when one of them randomly plays on a toy piano, but begin again when she teases him about the new prince who will take his place. The boy is completely terrified and only calms down when Hermione brings him to sit beside her on the bench. He settles into her arms, stretches out on the bench, but before he starts to whisper his story to her, he kicks out hard at her ladies sitting beside him, forcing them to leave the bench: ‘Yon grasshoppers shall not hear it’ (2.1.31). Hermione gives them an apologetic look asking for understanding and conveying ‘you know how he is’ as Leontes enters.

Nearly every critic cites the ultimate moment of Leontes’ attack on Hermione in the nursery when he hits her so hard it causes a miscarriage. It is reported variously that he ‘kicks her’ (Time Out), ‘knee[s] her’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘takes a running kick at the stomach’ (Independent), and ‘smashes his fist into her pregnant belly (The Times). On the recorded performance, the knee slams into the belly. This is the climax of a stream of escalated attacks, from a man whose affectionate embraces and kisses could feel like a blow. Leontes was extremely physical, always in motion, quick to push or punch. When Mamillius pestered him once too often, his response was to punch the boy hard enough to knock him down. When the courtier Camillo would not agree to poison Polixenes, he was thrown to the ground, straddled by Leontes and saved himself from the threatened punch to the face by agreeing. Whereupon Leontes helped him to his feet, embraced him, and kissed him on the mouth. His lightest blow to Hermione was to flick her nose with his finger, his most visually dramatic was to pull her hair so hard her body arched backwards. His eeriest violation of boundaries occurred in 1.2 when, struck by the tremor cordis he described his wife’s infidelities as he moved Polixenes and Hermione around like showroom dummies. Polixenes and Hermione sat a few feet apart on the bench and, as the lighting changes to blue, they froze. Leontes accenuated his claims by rearranging the position of their limbs and expressions on their faces. On ‘paddling palms and pinching fingers’ he stretched out their arms so their hands touched and wiggled their fingers; on ‘making practiced smiles’ he turned their heads toward each other and pulled the mouths awry’; on ‘then to sigh’ he squeezed their chests until they wheezed’ (1.2.115, 116, 117). Eventually he moved their bodies into a coital position, where he moved them back and forth, Hermione’s mouth opening at each thrust engineered by Leontes the puppet master. The culminating moment of these displays of irrational violence came, not with the blow that caused the miscarriage, but with Hermione’s response to it. Sitting on the floor, dazed, in shock and gasping for breath she reached up under her dress to check; when she withdrew the hand it was covered with blood. In a moment as pagan as any in mythology, she turned to Mamillius who was sitting next to her; soundlessly and expressionlessly she smeared her blood across his face and eyes. For a moment it had become a Greek tragedy. Nothing that followed was as powerful.

The Royal Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon Choreographer

Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale, an extraordinarily successful version of the play, parallels Declan Donnellan’s production in interesting ways, particularly the centrality of the pregnant belly/unborn baby as an object of violence. Stephen Purcell’s description of Cheek by Jowl’s Winter’s Tale in Shakespeare Survey as a ‘pared down, starkly symbolic staging, combining full-bodied emotional realism with stylized ensemble choreography’ could equally be describing Wheeldon’s version.Footnote ¹⁴² The ballet, a coproduction of London’s Royal Ballet and The National Ballet of Canada, premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2014, was revived there in 2016 and 2024, and is now regarded as one of the classic Shakespeare ballets, alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. The following reference material is linked to the 2016 production and is drawn from interviews with Wheeldon and Joby Talbot, the ballet’s composer, performance reviews (Hermione danced by Lauren Cuthbertson, Leontes by Edward Watson), and the commercial DVD of that production.Footnote ¹⁴³ It was Nicholas Hytner (director of the play at the National Theatre in 2001) who suggested Winter’s Tale to Wheeldon sometime around 2011 when they discussed the choreographer’s desire to create a new Shakespeare ballet. For this play, the ballet would need to create new scenes for events described but not seen on stage, including the death of Mamillius. It would also have to slim down the play, cut some scenes, shorten others, create new ones, remove some characters, minimize others, keep the corps de ballet in mind as well as lead dancers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In Wheeldon’s two-hour ballet, the core of the plot remains understandable, beautifully organized and dramatically conveyed, though he thought a viewer would still benefit from reading the programme notes before watching. The ballet also places a heavily pregnant Hermione at the centre of relationships and actions. Joan Acocella, writing in the New Yorker, was very aware of this focus and describes how in the opening scenes Leontes, Polixenes and Hermione ‘repeatedly dance enlaced, with the belly as a sort of fourth participant, the product, it might seem, of all their loves’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Leontes suffers the tremor cordis attack during this ‘enlaced’ dance when Hermione places his hand on one side of her pregnant belly and then puts Polixenes’ on the other side. Wheeldon explains: ‘She feels the baby’s kicking and she wants to share it with them’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Hermione is radiantly happy, but Leontes stares at his hand as if something is wrong with what it is feeling and jerks it back as if he is touching something infected. The child moving in Hermione’s womb feels wrong to him; it cannot be his. The idea takes over, twists his body, makes his fingers into spiders, his limbs out of control, and leaves him shattered. This becomes a ‘ballet bruto’. First he attacks Polixenes, throws him on the ground, stamps on him, tries to throttle him, and, when courtiers pull him off, he exits and returns with a knife. He then acts out the jealousy in a series of violent attacks aimed at the unborn child, even before the nursery scene where the worst violence usually occurs in productions. The pregnant belly is large, and appropriately of a size close to giving birth. Even descriptions of just a few of the dance moments convey the overwhelming abuse. His movements are sharp, angular, flexed-feet jumps, kicks that stab, elbows held at sharp angles. Even the skirt of his knee-length jacket lashes out dangerously as he twirls. Leontes keeps trying to wrap his arms around the belly in order to apply enough pressure to kill it. Acocella describes Hermione’s arabesques seeming ‘pinioned to a rack of pain’. At one point there is a series of short steps where Hermione, using all her strength, manages to hold his arms open and away from it, but at other times the arms are around it, and also under it, even lifting her entire torso up above his shoulders. Shakespeare wrote vicious speeches for Leontes’ attacks on Hermione, but seeing them translated into stylized dance movements makes the brutality vivid and relentless. It starts before he enters the nursery and explodes further there, and it lasts long because the movements must convey his earliest suspicions as well as later convictions.

Acocella emphasizes the role the pregnant belly plays in the ballet: ‘Hermione’s condition is very much stressed. Once she is accused of adultery, she keeps running her hand over her belly, as if to say to Leontes, “How can you doubt me? Look at the fruit of our love”. He stares at that belly thinking it contains ‘Polixenes’ child and this not only enrages him further; troublingly, it also seems to excite him a little. [ … ] Later he almost rapes the very pregnant Hermione. Even as he denounces Hermione, he buries his face in her abdomen’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Elizabeth Klett describes Leontes’ public accusations of infidelity as a ‘series of grand jetés and powerful developpé kicks diagonally across the stage towards Hermione, pointing an accusing finger continually’. Klett later lists the steps in a combative pas de deux where Leontes grabs Hermione’s hands and pulls them out in front of her so that ‘she counter balances against him, circling her leg in a series of ronds de jambe. [ … ] He jerks her forward, pulls on her hands, forces her to hop awkwardly by pushing from behind, then ‘clutches the sides of her torso with his elbows [ … ]. His hands are claws on either side of the pregnant belly’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ He throws her to the floor (the near rape Acocella refers to), gets on top of her, and when she tries to crawl out from under, pulls her back by the leg. Mamillius runs in and tries to pull her to safety. At his signal, Leontes’ officers toss the queen back and forth between them, until shielding her stomach, she falls. She refuses to allow them to touch her, and insists on the dignity of walking to prison without being forced, but, finally, nearly collapsing, she needs help from Paulina.

In the play the boy’s death takes place off stage and is announced by a Servant who interrupts the trial: ‘O sir, I shall be hated to report it / The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear / Of the queen’s speed, is gone’. Shakespeare gives Leontes’ a two-word response: ‘How, “gone”?’ which is matched by the Servant’s two words: ‘Is dead’ (3.2.140-45). Wheeldon covers this by giving Leontes a dance of mourning holding his son’s body. Mamillius dies on stage watching the trial, having crept downstairs carrying his teddy bear and hiding in the shadows. This is among the many invented scenes Wheeldon inserted to present material described but not shown. Bob Crowley’s costume worked together with the dancing in the opening scene to convey Shakespeare’s information about the kings’ boyhood friendship, their falling in love, their young princes, the arrival in Sicilia of Polixenes, his decision to leave, its reversal at Hermione’s persuasion. Crowley’s costumes for Hermione, all in deep purple, are all variations on a dress with a single line that starts with a leotard-style top and flows into a longish skirt. Hermione appears in a succession of costumes aligned to her own history: the dress is calf-length and she is flat-bellied when she is younger and being wooed, shown as the mother of Mamillius, and as the queen welcoming Polixenes at the start of his visit. Indicating a mid-point in this visit, the original dress is overlaid by another with a gathered panel at the front that draws attention to a small but visible pregnancy bump. Finally, at the point where the original play begins, she is heavily pregnant in an ankle length version of the dress, but now, without the gathered panel of cloth. The ample size of the belly needs nothing further to draw attention to it. It is clear that the sight of Hermione’s body enrages but also excites him.

After the intensity of the earlier, Sicilian, section of the ballet, the final scene seems almost anti-climactic, until its final moment. The statue of Hermione is next to an effigy of Mamillius which remains there when she comes alive and steps down from the platform. Her pas de deux of reconciliation with Leontes is at first tentative then sinuous. Paulina dances around the reunited families, performing a series of slow arabesques and reaching her hands up imploringly, perhaps invoking the dead child. As Hermione and Perdita leave, Leontes turns back to Mamillius’ statue, reaches towards it longingly. Paulina shakes her head, gestures for him to follow the others. She stays, and stretches out prone before the statue, then bends her torso forward, sweeping her arms over her head as the curtain falls. The final image is the boy’s statue, a black silhouette against a swirling red background (139–140). Declan Donnellan also ended Cheek by Jowl’s production with Mamillius. Before he exited the boy walked, unseen, around the reunited living, unable to reach out to them. An important point of Shakespeare’s play is Hermione’s absolute forgiveness, the joy (or peace) of reconciliation and perhaps even salvation. In productions such as these, where Leontes’ attacks become so deeply, physically vicious, it is much harder to accept Shakespeare’s ending. Wheeldon and Donnellan’s conclusions, focused on the presence of the dead boy, leave a trace of the unforgiveable; they are a reminder of the collateral damage of Leontes’ actions that were made even more sadistic by Hermione’s visible pregnancy. The memory of what has been seen cannot be reversed and skews the ending.